Book Review

The experience of reading Kristine Langley Mahler’s Teen Queen Training is not unlike reading a book about cryptography that includes examples of cracked codes and the ciphers used to solve them—say perhaps The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagone’s narrative history about pioneering codebreaker Elizebeth Friedman. Fagone outlines step-by-step how Friedman decrypted lines of ciphertext like:

E A W I Z T Z N X O

I E U R Y R X F E H

U I U H Z F E N N X

Similarly, Mahler detects coded instructions for adolescent girls in an etiquette book from the 1960s. Teen Queen Training is a book of erasure essays, a literary version of a book cipher. In a typical book cipher, encrypted messages are located within a text that serves as the key. Instead, the etiquette book is Mahler’s key. She lays out the rules for her cipher upfront: No words or letters are added to the original text, though punctuation is fair game. White space is eliminated along with the original text.

The liberal erasure of letters, words, and phrases yields hidden messages. In this passage from the etiquette book:

It’s the classic description of someone who’s nice to have around—the good companion; the good opponent; the good-natured, easy, noncomplaining guest. Without sportsmanship the game’s a bore.

Mahler finds:

It’s the classic description of someone who’s nice, good, noncomplaining: a bore.

This passage:

You make or break a reputation for yourself, your school, your age group generally by the way you act in public. You can create an image of teens that is wonderful or awful, because adults react emotionally to disturbing public behavior . . .

becomes:

You make or break yourself by your teens. That’s a fact.

Reading Mahler’s erasures feels at first like a game, like reverse engineering a parlor trick. Each essay begins with an image from the etiquette book—the first page of the chapter that produced the essay, with Mahler’s markings included. Instead of blacking out the erased text, Mahler has circled the text preserved in her essay so that the original text remains visible. It’s impossible to resist scanning between the original and the erasure, tracking Mahler’s work until she moves beyond the first page of the chapter she’s decoding and there’s no original image to consult.

The comparison soon becomes more somber than entertaining: an excavation revealing pernicious messages that lurk in both the original and erasure texts. Unlike the key text in a traditional book cipher, the etiquette book carries overt meaning that informs and interacts with Mahler’s erasures.

The etiquette book enumerates endless rules for dating, dining out, giving gifts, attending school functions. Many of the rules are antiquated: There’s a section on telephone manners, exercises for pleasant sounding speech, and tips on packing to visit a beau at prep school. Mahler’s erasures expose how these standards still shape our expectations for young women.

“There are two sure signs you’ve been a success at a school or college weekend;” the etiquette book asserts. “First, you had a marvelous time: this puts you halfway up the ladder. Second, you’re asked to go again: you may have to wait for this, but it’s the definitive mark of success.”

Decoding the chapter that contains this advice, Mahler finds: “You drink to prove you’re trying it and know how. You ask for a twist of lemon peel. You want to curb the next sport who’s eager to fix you a drink—some ‘funny boy’—but you say nothing, manage quietly.” The persona may have evolved from Sandra Dee to Gillian Flynn’s “cool girl,” but the mandate is the same: to make a boy like you.

Mahler’s subversion of the second person imperative is especially effective in exposing what’s embedded in the original text. A chapter about driving rules instructs: “Constant lane-hopping . . . could result in a collision . . . Bumper-hugging is just as annoying . . . Refusing to let a car enter your lane when it’s pulling out of a driveway into a stream of traffic is pure selfishness—hardly worth the time it might save.” Mahler brilliantly offers: “Hugging is just annoying, failing, blind. Others roar ahead, changed; slower reactions and dawdling is bad, but a last-minute flash of a directional-brake (refusing to enter) is pure selfishness. Hardly worth it.”

Here, as in other passages tinged with sexual peril, Mahler shows that she knows the purpose of intercepting a code: to alert those who may be harmed by the secret. Teen Queen Training’s plaintext message turns out to be about the pressure on young women to erase parts of themselves for the pleasure of the male world. By laying bare this demand, Mahler empowers readers to reject it and reclaim their complete selfhood.